On the fifth day of a 5,000-mile drive across two continents, Kara and Nate pulled Big Bertha, a retired Colorado school bus, up to the Moldova border crossing and handed over a phone. A phone with a digital vehicle registration. The border guard stared at it, shook his head, and the team learned, the hard way, that a screen is not a stamp. For anyone who has ever wondered what happens when a nine-person crew in a converted school bus tries to bluff their way into a former Soviet republic with paperwork that technically does not exist in paper form, this is that story.
The Mongol Rally has no official route, no support crew, and no rulebook beyond ‘make it to the finish line party in six weeks.’ Kara and Nate assembled a crew of nine for the attempt, including Nate’s brother Dusty and his traveling companion Sarah, the Notch family, and their best friend Charlie, who had already shared road time across 14 countries with them. Their vehicle of choice was a government-auction school bus from Colorado, shipped across the Atlantic to Germany and driven to the start line in Prague.
The road that required 6,520 tons of dynamite
Day four unfolded in Romania in the best possible way. The morning started at a campground where the owner shared homemade liquor and local farmers had left baskets of handpicked blueberries and homemade pickles for guests to browse and buy. From there, the bus climbed the mountain road Top Gear once called the best driving road in the world. The road reaches a highest point of 6,000 ft, features 90 hairpin turns, and was carved with 6,520 tons of dynamite. Dusty drove every one of those turns.
Romania is home to the largest brown bear population in Europe, and the crew encountered not one but eight of them, several close enough to touch the side of the bus. One bear sat down beside the window. Another yawned and appeared to nap. ‘We’re basically in a safari vehicle,’ Kara noted. ‘There is no better way to drive this road than in a school bus apparently.’ Research done during the drive the next day added a darker layer: the internet puts brown bear attacks in Romania at roughly 28 per year, with around 30 people killed over the last two decades, and estimates suggest the country’s natural habitat can sustainably support about 4,000 bears against a current population of 8,000 to 12,000.
Between the bears and the summit, the crew stopped at a roadside shop where a Romanian woman was making a filled flatbread from scratch, weighing and rolling dough by hand. The filling turned out to be mashed potato and salted cheese, pulled straight from the pan. A nearby stall offered something more adventurous: bear salami. Charlie tried it. The verdict was that it tasted quite similar to any other salami, though reportedly with a higher sense of personal achievement.
A phone registration and a border that wanted paper
The real trouble started when the bus left the EU. Crossing into Romania from within the Schengen zone had felt like driving between US states. The Moldova border was something else entirely. The team had been warned online: reviews described it as the worst crossing in Europe, with guards known to slow-walk lanes until a payment resolved the delay.
What actually stalled them was simpler and harder to fix. When the bus was shipped across the Atlantic, the physical registration documents were left with the shipping company, mailed back, and lost somewhere in transit. Colorado issues an official digital registration through a state app, and the team assumed that would hold. The Moldova border guard disagreed. He wanted a physical document with a security element, something with an official seal. ‘In the US it’s just a piece of paper,’ Nate told the guard. ‘There’s no official stamps.’ The guard was not unsympathetic, but the answer was no. The team was officially denied entry.
A Romanian driver waiting behind them suggested printing the registration at a nearby shop, laminating it, and trying a different border crossing in the morning. That became the plan. The crew talked their way back into Romania, which, as Nate pointed out, was not actually guaranteed, and found a room in a small town nearby after three hours of WhatsApp negotiations. The hotel turned out to be an actively under-construction apartment where the kitchen was still being fitted, the live electrical cables were described as a mild hazard, and one of the rooms had no airflow and was immediately nicknamed the dungeon. Nine people played rock paper scissors to decide who slept there.
The bear paw print on the side of Big Bertha
Before the border drama erased the day, one of the bears had pressed close enough to leave a faint smudge of mud and a few small scratches along the side of the bus. By morning, someone noticed it and did not want to wipe it off.
Big Bertha rolled into her sixth day still technically outside Moldova, still carrying nine people, still running on diesel that took a minor international consultation to confirm was actually diesel, and still wearing the mark of a Romanian brown bear that had simply decided to lean against a school bus for a while on the best road in the world.
